Movies reviewed this week: Never Let Go and …And the Fifth Horseman Is Fear.
Population: One
Movies reviewed this week: The Beast Must Die, The Black Vampire, Panic, Razzia, Le Doulos, Any Number Can Win, A Colt Is My Passport, and Branded to Kill.
Movies reviewed this week: The Gentlemen.
Most of my hobby time in 2010 went to playing Living Forgotten Realms. I had a really good time doing it, for the most part. As I recall I’d been playing since early 2009; I know I started playing in Boston and it turned into our main gaming outlet once we moved down to the Baltimore area.
In 2010, I decided to try and play 50 LFR games over the course of the year, and further decided to blog them all in one of those occasional fits of organization I have. This was a wildly unambitious goal, as it turned out. I wound up playing or GMing 120 games. I’m pretty sure I pushed through one or two of those in December so that I could hit a round number.
I never did hit epic tier with Reed. I can’t imagine how I would dig up enough players to do that even informally now; kind of a pity. Man, he was a great character, though. I used to start out adventures by hiring a bunch of townsfolk to cheer him and Faral on their way out of town.
Anyhow! For some reason I did all that blogging on a Tumblr, and it occurred to me today that some day that’ll go away, so I spent an hour or so importing them back to WordPress and fixing up the tags. A few of the links will be broken unless I get around to fixing them eventually, but the whole insane year is now captured under the lfr2010 tag. Call it a very very small slice of gaming history.
Boy, either my cell phone camera was really terrible or Tumblr killed the resolution on my photos. Sorry about that.
Movies reviewed this week: Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
Movies reviewed this week: 6 Underground.
I was perusing the Criterion Channel’s themed collections the other day and realized that the Caught on Tape collection was a) smack dab in my wheelhouse and b) mostly unseen by me. So in an effort to get my money’s worth out of my subscription, I decided to work through the whole collection. I’ve seen Diva and The Lives of Others before, but both are well worth revisiting.
The first movie was A Face in the Crowd, which doesn’t actually fit into the collection theme but never mind that. I’m a sucker for a good old-fashioned evil American populist movie, mostly because of my Huey Long obsession. This was that.
Andy Griffith was really awesome. Like everyone else in the world I think of him as the down to earth charming guy. His “Lonesome” Rhodes had all the charm plus a huge helping of self-centered evil, so that was great. He’s always just on the edge of over-acting which is a perfect fit for his kinda dumb drifter character.
His downfall is a great exemplar of the myth of exposure, which is particularly poignant lately. “Trump can’t possibly wriggle out of this one… ah, yes. Well. Nevertheless.” We know better than to believe that exposed contempt will strip away popularity these days; it’s wryly amusing to see one of the early expressions of that trope. To be fair the public turned against Nixon, so perhaps Kazan and Schulberg weren’t completely off-base.
They got the rest of it right, though. A billionaire and a Senator backing the populist for their own ends? Yep. Nativist sentiment as a political tool? Yep — and that was the most chilling scene of the movie.
The other night five of us got together with the intention of playing a 2-3 session game of Beyond the Wall. Our experience with D&D variants ranged from lots to little; we’ve just finished a lengthy Blades in the Dark campaign, so we’re used to gaming with each other. Here’s how the first session went.
Movies reviewed this week: The Irishman and The Good Liar.
Movies reviewed this week: Terminator: Dark Fate.